SITE REVIEW: Newsy

Currently it is based off of a simple design, but I believe there is too much black. Any suggestions on how to change it?

Most of the errors that are causing validation to fail are the things I am required to use. Like the iframe for the news article and the advertisements.

Hob Bramble

Proficient

Posts: 351

Loc: Indiana, USA

3+ Months Ago

Alrighty - cross-browser wise, your site looked exactly the same in Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7, Netscape 9, Opera 9, and Maxthon 2. I haven't checked it in Internet Explorer 6 yet - once I do I'll post again if I find any problems there. It worked fine in Lynx as well.

As you mentioned, your code isn't valid (36 errors). No offence, but that's quite a lot for a website with only 36 lines of code. I realize you have the iframe and advertisements, but if they are causing that many errors, you should make some adjustments. Use a different advertising setup, perhaps, and ditch the iframe altogether. Just place the news article on your page, if you can, or post a portion of it and include a link to the full article. A link would be much better than an iframe. (On the bright side, your CSS validates just fine.)

As for your design - well, there isn't really a while lot to it at the moment. For a start, I would make the entire centre column white (or another colour) from top to bottom, instead of having the logo appear in the black space at the top - this would help make the centre column seem more unified.

The logo itself needs work - the text and icon look like they were originally on one colour, but then the background was replaced with black, so they don't blend correctly into the background. Also, you have stretched the image a little bit, and it somewhat shows. I'd have the image appear at the original size. I'd also set the logo image to have a border of 0 pixels, because at the moment, it has a blue border around it in every browser except Opera, and it doesn't look good.

I noticed that the "Discuss this Article" link under the article simply sends you to the top of the page, I assume so that you can click the link above the article. This seems rather silly to me when it could just link directly to the discussion page.

I'd find it much more convenient if the "Discuss this Article" link lead directly to the article discussion, as well, instead of to the "Today's Article" forum.

It would also be better if the site and forum shared the same template, rather then different looks altogether.

You may want to take a look at Bunpai - another news and discussion website. It works a little differently (rather than posting one article a day, Bunpai uses a PunBB forum modification which collects news from RSS feeds for news agencies such as Reuters and the AP, and then posts the items in those feeds as topics in their forum, so people can post their replies directly to the topic. They also display the latest topics on their home page), the basic concept is the same. I'm not saying you need to have multiple articles or use RSS feeds like they do - I'm saying you should try to integrate your forum topics and news items more seamlessly.

This could be accomplished simply by posting the news article, part of the article and a link, or just a link to the article as a topic's first post, and displaying the first post on your home page, so that people could simply reply directly to it. If you could display replies to the topic on your home page (in essence, you home page would be the topic page for the days article), it would be even better, as it would reduce the amount of clicking necessary to get to the discussion.

Though your design could use some work (it needs more design, mostly - right now it's just a white box inside a black window, with a single image - there's just not much to it), you really need to focus more on your layout. You need to reduce the amount of clicking around necessary, ditch the iframe, and make for site look more unified, as at the moment, it looks like a news article with a link to a forum, and not like a site for discussing news.

Once you've gotten that done, you can worry about the design itself. I really can't offer any advice there (except that you should clean up the logo), because there really isn't much design there yet. That's not really a bad thing, if you want a more minimal look (but if you want that, I'd ditch the black background altogether so you just have a white background with black text and a logo - think [urlhttp://craigslist.org/]craigslist[/url]), but if you don't you need to decide what look you are going for, and start adding colour and creating images (keep in mind: some are good, just not too many) around that.

winterdude

Newbie

Posts: 6

3+ Months Ago

I will have to make a link for the article. Because I cannot put it directly on the page without paying a $50 fee to the AP.

Thanks for all of the other suggestions though. I have some work to do for sure.

Guy who knows things

Beginner

Posts: 59

Loc: UK

3+ Months Ago

Oh, I went to check it out and it was being renovated, lol. Guess I'll come back later then.....

quaker

Born

Posts: 1

Loc: Huntsville, AL

3+ Months Ago

Well i want to thank Hob Bramble for talking about my quick and dirty rss news feed site... http://bunpai.com..